Was Antarctica ever warm?
For most of the last 400 million years, Antarctica has been a slight place covered with forests and animals. Due to the continental drift, it has moved from the straddle of the equator to focus at the South Pole, where it is today. Today, Antarctica is the coldest continent on the planet, almost completely covered with an ice layer, and completely lacks animals in addition to the penguin visits and several small mistakes in coastal areas.
But it wasn't always so. Antarctica was once part of the Gondwan supercontinent, which lasted only about 160 million years ago when it slowly began to crumble. Gondwana today included most continents in the southern hemisphere, including South America, Africa, Arabia, India, Australia and New Zealand. Gondwana straddled the equator and was one of the two supercontinents in the world, along with Laurasia, including contemporary North America and Asia. The fossils of some of the first complex lives were found in the toe -shallow sea. Many of the fossil records of the Antarctic mainland are under the ice but fossilIE, including dinosaurs, can be found in the Antarctic Mountains, where it protrudes from a continuous mile of deep ice cap.
In the times of dinosaurs, Gondwana's North-South orientation blocked currents in circulation in a certain width, instead they were facing north and south over long distances. This prevented the temperature differentials from any given latitude to force water to permanent hot or cold temperatures, as the poles are today.
When Antarctica began to break away from the supercontinent of Gondwan 160 million years ago, cooling began. He moved to the south, still attached to Australia and South America, but closed from Africa. At this point, Antarctica was still tropical or subtropical climate, but was located further south, near the width of today's Australia. Like today's Australia, the continent had Marsupial fauna.
about 40 million years ago Antarctica separated from today's Australia and fromAlthough even more cool, his forests were dying. Ice and glaciers began to cover the continent, but the end end of the life of Antarctica came only 23 million years ago, when Antarctica separated from South America and opened Drake's passage. This allowed the existence of Antarctic Cirumpolar current, a freezing current that continuously surrounds the continent. As a result, the continent was covered with a kilometer -deep layer of ice, because the snow that fell had never been signed up. Today Antarctica's Ice Sheet contains about 70% of all fresh water on the ground.